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Charles Dickens…the Complusive Performer

“Literature was his wife, the theatre was his mistress, and to the very end he was tempted to leave the one for the other,” writes Simon Callow of Charles Dickens in Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Callow theorizes that it was Dickens’ love of the theater that added such drama and power to his written work. Dickens loved being a part of the theater, and audiences would sob uncontrollably, laugh till the rafters shook, sit in glassy-eyed wonder, and fight for admission to see him perform. Callow’s slim, candid biography is the perfect follow-up to anyone who enjoyed Dickens by Peter Ackroyd or Claire Tomalin’s more recent biography, Charles Dickens: A Life.